Wikipedia is teaming with universities in a bid to entice professors and their students to beef up its coverage of complicated public-policy topics — part of a move by the online encyclopedia to strengthen editing and fill in gaps in its articles.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which finances and oversees the nonprofit site, received a $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation to work with academic experts on Wikipedia articles related to public policy, which could include everything from political theory to legislative history and issues such as health reform and science.

The goal is to get professors — and, in turn, their students — involved in producing more articles on public policy and improving the quality of the articles that already exist, said Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh. He said the site expects experts to both vet Wikipedia existing entries and point out entire topics of importance to public policy that haven’t been addressed on the site.

Wikipedia, which relies on volunteers to write and edit its encyclopedia entries, has long been at the forefront of an idea called “crowd sourcing,” in which the wisdom of many individuals is brought together. But as the site has aged, it has become clear that some topics, particularly complex ones, get short shrift compared with others.

The public-policy effort follows earlier work with scientists from the National Institutes of Health to improve the quality of articles in the health field, but the new program will be more extensive and will involve a number of institutions, Mr. Walsh said. He said public policy was chosen as the topic because “every American is pretty heavily invested” in it, and because it’s complex, fast-moving and involves many different viewpoints — an area that is an ideal target for expert attention.

A big question for Wikipedia is whether the new expert editors will find Wikipedia’s culture easy to navigate. The Journal reported last year that editors were leaving the site in droves, as the venture had gone from being a freewheeling and open endeavor into a system that was more hierarchical, with pages of rules and a culture that served as a barrier to new participants.

“We have data that says it’s difficult to crawl through those barriers,” Mr. Walsh said, so the foundation is going to create a special site where public-policy faculty and students can communicate and learn what works and what doesn’t on the site. In particular, he said, the effort will focus on finding people who can regularly contribute or supervise contributions, rather than simply having students who “go in as part of a class assignment and never come back.”

The effort isn’t a move to replace existing editors. “It would be folly to move into this project without making sure Wikipedians are involved,” Mr. Walsh said, adding that most people who work on the site are interested in attracting more editors.

The money from the Stanton Foundation will go toward new staff positions at Wikimedia that will be focused on outreach to universities, as well as on travel to bring policy experts and Wikipedia editors together. Wikimedia’s goal is to work through the summer on establishing relationships with universities, so that work with Wikipedia can be integrated into the curriculum of classes beginning in the fall.